Language Log

There may be Language Log readers whose reaction to the wonderful series of posts started by Victor Mair (the ones with the photographs of signs in Chinese supermarkets saying things like "Fuck to spread the fruit"), now classified under our Lost In Translation category, was that they constitute cruel mockery and humiliation of Chinese people. Not our intent, of course; these disastrous mistranslations are a linguistic phenomenon crying out to be explained. If we merely wanted to laugh at Chinese grocery store managers we would want the signs left up uncorrected. We would never mention them; we would just pass the photos round by email, and snigger privately. Anyway, it's not about Chinese or the Chinese people, though various factors conspire to make their errors salient (there are over a billion of them, and many of them never meet a native speaker who could serve as an informal translation consultant, and the language has a very high degree of non-systematic polysemy). Long-time Language Log readers may recall that Spanish attempts at constructing English prose can be just as capable of being unintendedly hilarious.

Indeed, yesterday I was in a hotel in La Coruña, a bustling port city of northern Spain, and I found that the room service menu offered, among other things, Kettledrum of potatoes with broken eggs and creaking ham. I'll leave comments open below for people to try their hand at figuring out from Spanish/English dictionaries how this little translinguistic catastrophe could have happened. ("Creaking" was not a typo; "creaking pizza" was also on the menu.) It might be charged that there is much less excuse for such zany mangling of English in the case of a port city across the Bay of Biscay from England: La Coruña is just 90 minutes' flight time from Heathrow, and hundreds or thousands of native speakers of English come through every week. All a hotel manager would have to do would be to sit down with one guest for five minutes to learn that a kettledrum is a poor choice of cooking utensil, and that the (utterly delicious) ham of northern Spain does not creak any more than pizza does.

Because of the recent catastrophe in the Irawaddy delta, the names of the country formerly known as Burma are in the news again. The same thing happened last fall, when the news was full of protest marches led by Buddhist monks ("Should it be Burma or Myanmar?", BBC News Magazine, 9/26/2008):

The ruling military junta changed its name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, a year after thousands were killed in the suppression of a popular uprising. Rangoon also became Yangon. […]

The two words mean the same thing and one is derived from the other. Burmah, as it was spelt in the 19th Century, is a local corruption of the word Myanmar.

They have both been used within Burma for a long time, says anthropologist Gustaaf Houtman, who has written extensively about Burmese politics.

"There's a formal term which is Myanmar and the informal, everyday term which is Burma. Myanmar is the literary form, which is ceremonial and official and reeks of government. [The name change] is a form of censorship."

If Burmese people are writing for publication, they use 'Myanmar', but speaking they use 'Burma', he says.

This reflects the regime's attempt to impose the notion that literary language is master, Mr Houtman says, but there is definitely a political background to it.

Richard Coates, a linguist at the University of Western England, says adopting the traditional, formal name is an attempt by the junta to break from the colonial past.

Leaving aside the notion that the local pronunciation is a "corruption", the BBC's discussion omits the most interesting part of the story, at least from an American point of view. They should have asked John Wells, whose discussion of the question I linked to at the time ("Myanmar is mama", 10/15/2007). And the explanations that I've heard and read this time around — yesterday on NPR, for example — again miss the key point. So here it is.

There is no 'r'!

We can read today at the Catholic News Agency's website and elsewhere that:

Linguistics has a profound human value. It is a science that opens the heart and the mind. It helps us to put our lives, our hopes, our problems in the right perspective. In this regard, and here I speak as a priest and a Jesuit, it is an apostolic instrument that can bring us closer to God.

Wait, my bad. It was Fr. Funes, Director of the Vatican's Observatory, speaking, and he actually said that Astronomy has a profound human value etc. etc. Nobody ever got closer to God by reading Language Log. But anyway, Funes went on to comment on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, saying that:

From the blog "Stuff White People Like", a 12 May posting on "Grammar" that begins:

White people love rules. It explains why so they get upset when people cut in line, why they tip so religiously and why they become lawyers. But without a doubt, the rule system that white people love the most is grammar. It is in their blood not only to use perfect grammar but also to spend significant portions of time pointing out the errors of others.

Geoff Pullum's most recent posting on split infinitives noted that handbooks on grammar and usage do not prohibit them, but most say they should be avoided, unless splitting the infinitive would improve clarity. When you think about it, this is decidedly odd advice.

There's some history here, which is well covered in MWDEU, and has now been briefly treated by John McIntyre in his blog You Don't Say. The short version: the split infinitive as a bugaboo lodged itself in "the popular press and folk belief" (MWDEU) in the 19th century, so that the handbooks now say (and have been saying for a century or so), in effect, that there's nothing grammatically wrong with split infinitives, but some people are offended by them, so you should avoid them as much as possible, to avoid giving offense. In McIntyre's words: "the only reason to avoid splitting infinitives is to escape the uninformed censure of people who think that it is a violation of grammar and usage."

In other words, crazies win.

Slate reports on Justice Antonin Scalia's new book, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, written with Bryan Garner. Scalia has never been timid about offering his opinions on virtually any subject and Garner is cited regularly in Language Log posts on matters of general and legal usage. As authorities, they make an interesting pair. There is a useful review of Making Your Case in the ABA Journal but I want to focus on only one point about which the media seem to disagree. And I'll try to figure out why they do so.

My friend Steven Levine wrote me a little while ago with a small question about English — about the verb process, accented on the second syllable, meaning 'to go, walk, or march in procession' (theOED's definition). Steven was familiar with the verb from Morris dancing, where a certain amount of proCESSing goes on. As Steven wrote:

There is a form of Morris dance called a "processional" — which means just what you'd think, a dance that moves the team along, usually at a brisk pace. You dance processionals when you are in a parade.

Among Morris dancers, I have often heard the verb "process" (accent on the second syllable) used to described doing this. "We're going to process down Nicollet Mall after we finish dancing at the library."

But then he found himself writing the word for the first time and noticed the homography problem: there's another verb process, accented on the first syllable. That drove him to the dictionaries, where he found no trace of proCESS. Was this just Morris dancer jargon? Should he avoid using it outside the Morris dancing community? If so, how (with proceed, for instance)? And should he avoid it in writing (for fear of ambiguity)?

Ask Language Log comes to the rescue!

The link was sent in by Andy Hollandbeck with the comment "I sometimes get the idea that at least one of the SNL writers is a regular Language Log reader".

From Leah Garchik's May 12 column in the SF Chronicle:

American poet Robert Bly, who will be at a Marin Poetry Festival reading at Dominican University in San Rafael on Sunday, told Sedge Thomson on "West Coast Live" last week that there's a reason Irish poetry is particularly melodic. "The Irish have time for long vowel sounds – unlike the English, who have too much to do. All those colonies are a lot of trouble."

[Tip of the hat to John V. Burke]

In a recent post ("Creole birdsong?", 5/9/2008), I mentioned Derek Bickerton's "language bioprogram hypothesis". Derek responded with a long comment. Since I responded to his comment with another post ("A multi-generational bioprogram? Derek Bickerton objects", 5/10/2008), I invited him to respond in kind. The guest post below is the result.

During a recent meeting with a grad student about research, the student produced if whether or not at the beginning of a subordinate clause where either if or whether or not (but not the two together) would have been appropriate. I  didn't catch the preceding context in detail, but I did notice the expression, and afterwards I googled on it.

And, of course, pulled up quite a few (legitimate-looking) examples. I have an idea about why people might have hit on this doubly-marked subordination (which I don't recall having come across before, and which seems to have escaped the notice of usage complainers; if it came by them, they probably just thought it was a slip of the tongue).

Truly, this is the golden age of linguistic blogging. The past week has seen three incredible breakthroughs in the area of typology, all based on discoveries announced in weblog posts.

A recent Associated Press wire story about the declining stock market contained an optimistic note from Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors. Orlando says the market is in decent shape, with two exceptions:

"Our view has been that the market, generally speaking, is in pretty good shape with the exception of the financial service companies and the consumer dictionary companies," he said.

The consumer dictionary companies? Are Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, et al. in trouble? Will they be needing a massive bailout from the Federal Reserve? Our lexicographical colleagues need not worry, since the AP article appears to be reflecting a different kind of dictionary trouble: the dreaded Cupertino effect.